Arctic Yearbook 2014 - Page 357

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Arctic Yearbook 2014
Tourism has been chosen as one of the main strategic targets of those new industries in the region
(“Marina Kovtun: Odna…” 2013).
This paper analyses the challenges of economic diversification in two single-industry mining
communities of the Murmansk region: Kirovsk and Revda2 (Figure 1). Both of them evaluated their
future economic sustainability as part of a programme led by the Minregion. There was an external
push by the Russian state and the Murmansk region’s government towards Revda, which was
requested to promote economic diversification in the town. Revda was identified as one of the seven
most economically depressed single-industry towns in all of Russia, whose economic diversification
was regarded as a priority, and therefore supported by investments from the Russian state (Dmitriev
2011). As a result, comprehensive investment plans (hereafter CIPs) with proposals for projects that
were to receive investment were created. The diversification plans for Kirovsk and Revda in 2010
placed tourism as the main target for development in their economic restructuring. However, in the
years since then, significant challenges to their planned development path, especially to Revda’s,
have emerged. These challenges are the product of various factors, such as their different historical
development paths, including the particular economic history of these two communities.
Figure 1: Resource communities of the Murmansk region and the location of Kirovsk and Revda
Resource-Based Development & the Challenge of Economic Diversification